soft or charming in her personal life, es-
chews the standard novelistic tricks for
warming or softening Lily's image-
the book is devoid of pet-the-dog mo-
ments. So why is it so hard to stop
reading Lily's story?
One big reason is that she doesn't
h " h " Th .
ave enoug money. e partIcu-
lars of her shortfall may not be sympa-
thetic-she needs to dress well and
gamble at bridge tables in order to
catch a man who can enable her to
dress well and gamble for the rest of
her life-but one of the mysterious
strengths of the novel as an art form,
from Balzac forward, is how readily
readers connect with the financial
anxieties of fictional characters. When
Lily, by taking a long romantic walk
with Selden, is ruining her chance to
marry the extremely wealthy but com-
ically boring and prudish Percy Gryce,
with whom she would have had the
bleakest of relationships, you may find
yourself wanting to shout at her, "You
idiot! Don't do it! Get back to the
house and seal the deal with Gryce!"
Money, in novels, is such a potent re-
ality principle that the need for it can
override even our wish for a character
to live happily ever after, and Whar-
ton, throughout the book, applies the
principle with characteristic relentless-
ness, tightening the financial screws on
Lily as if the author were in league with
nature at its most unforgiving.
What finally undoes Lily, though,
isn't the unforgiving world but her own
bad decisions, her failures to foresee the
seemingly obvious social consequences
of her actions. Her propensity for error
is a second engine of sympathy. We all
know how it feels to be making a mis-
take, and the deliciousness of watching
other people make one-particularly the
mistake of marrying the wrong per-
son-is a core appeal of narratives from
" 0 di "" M . ddl h " Wh
e pus to I emarc. arton
compounds the deliciousness in "The
House of Mirth" by creating an emi-
nently marriageable heroine whose mis-
take is to be too afraid of making the
mistake of marrying wrong. Again and
again, at the crucial moment, Lily blows
up her opportunities to trade her beauty
for financial security, or at least for a
chance at happiness.
I don't know of another novel more
preoccupied with female beauty than
"The House of Mirth." That Whar-
ton, who was fluent in German, chose
to saddle her lily-like heroine with a
beard-in German, Bart-points to-
ward the gender inversions that the
author engaged in to make her difficult
life livable and her private life story
writable, as well as toward other forms
of inversion, such as giving Lily the
looks that she didn't have and denying
her the money that she did have. The
novel can be read as a sustained effort
by Wharton to imagine beauty from
the inside and achieve sympathy for
it, or, conversely, as a sadistically slow
and thorough punishment of the
pretty girl she couldn't be. Beauty in
novels usually cuts two ways. On the
one hand, we're aware of how often it
deforms the moral character of people
who possess it; on the other hand, it
represents a kind of natural capital, like
a tree's perfect fruit, that we're instinc-
tively averse to seeing wasted. Ticking
along through the novel, as inexorable
as the decline in Lily's funds, is the
clock on her youthful good looks. The
clock starts running on page 1-"under
her dark hat and veil she regained the
girlish smoothness, the purity of tint,
that she was beginning to lose after
eleven years of late hours and indefat-
igable dancing" -and it continues to
heighten the urgency of Lily's plight,
inviting us to share in it emotionally.
But only at the book's very end, when
Lily finds herself holding another
woman's baby and experiencing a host
of unfamiliar emotions, does a more
powerful sort of urgency crash into
view. The financial potential of her
looks is revealed to have been an arti-
ficial value, in contrast to their authen-
tic value in the natural scheme of
human reproduction. What has been
simply a series of private misfortunes
for Lily suddenly becomes something
o
o
larger: the tragedy of aNew York City
social world whose priorities are so di-
vorced from nature that they kill the
emblematically attractive female who
ought, by natural right, to thrive. The
reader is driven to search for an expla-
nation of the tragedy in Lily's appall-
ingly deforming social upbringing-
the kind of upbringing that Wharton
herself felt deformed by-and to pity
her for it, as, per Aristotle, a tragic pro-
tagonist must be pitied.
But sympathy in novels need not be
simply a matter of the reader's direct
identification with a fictional character.
It can also be driven by, say, myadmi-
ration of a character who is long on vir-
tues I am short on (the moral courage of
Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of
Alyosha Karamazov), or, most interest-
ingly, by my wish to be a character who
is unlike me in ways I don't admire or
even like. One of the great perplexities
of fiction-and the quality that makes
the novel the quintessentially liberal art
form-is that we experience sympathy
so readily for characters we wouldn't like
in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soul-
less social climber, Tom Ripley may be
a sociopath, the Jackal may want to as-
sassinate the French President, Mickey
Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-in-
volved old goat, and Raskolnikov may
want to get away with murder, but I find
myself rooting for each of them. This is
sometimes, no doubt, a function of the
lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure
of imagining what it would be like to be
unburdened by scruples. In every case,
though, the alchemical agent by which
fiction transmutes my secret envy or my
ordinary dislike of "bad" people into
sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a
novelist has to do is give a character a
powerful desire (to rise socially, to get
away with murder) and I, as a reader,
become helpless not to make that desire
my own.
I n Wharton's "The Custom of the
Country" (1913), as in "The House
of Mirth," an unfit member of old New
York society fails to survive. But here
the harshly Darwinian "nature" is the
new, industrialized, nakedly capitalist
America, and the victim is certainly not
the protagonist, Undine Spragg. The
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 13 & 20, 2012 63